As a solo actor, Fry played the lead in the film Wilde, was Melchett in the Blackadder television series and is the host of the erudite, but comedy-based quiz show, QI. He also presented a 2008 television series Stephen Fry in America, which saw him travelling across all 50 U.S. states in six episodes. Fry has become known to American audiences for his recurring guest role as Dr. Gordon Wyatt on the Fox crime series Bones.

Early life

Fry was born in Hampstead, London, the son of Marianne Eve Fry (née Newman) and Alan John Fry, who was an English physicist and inventor.[2][3] His maternal grandparents, Martin and Rosa Neumann,[3] were Jewish immigrants from Šurany, which is now in Slovakia,[3][4] and his mother's aunt and cousins died in Auschwitz.[3] Fry grew up in the village of Booton near Reepham, Norfolk, having moved from Chesham, Buckinghamshire at a young age.

Fry briefly attended Cawston Primary School, Cawston, Norfolk, described later in his 1997 book Moab Is My Washpot,[5] before going on to Stouts Hill Preparatory School and then to Uppingham School, Rutland, where he joined Fircroft house. He was expelled from Uppingham when he was fifteen, and subsequently from Paston School.

Forgiving Fry and Laurie for The Crystal Cube, the BBC commissioned a sketch show in 1986 that was to become A Bit of Fry and Laurie. The programme ran for 26 episodes spanning four series between 1986 and 1995, and was very successful. During this time Fry starred in Blackadder II as Lord Melchett, made a guest appearance in Blackadder the Third as the Duke of Wellington, then returned to a starring role in Blackadder Goes Forth as General Melchett. In 1988, he became a regular contestant on the popular improvisational comedy radio show Whose Line Is It Anyway?. However, when it moved to television, he only appeared three times: twice in the first series and once in the ninth.

QI

In 2003, he began hosting QI, a panel game that has become one of the most-watched entertainment programmes on British television.[8] In 2006, he won the Rose d'Or award for "Best Game Show Host" for his work on the series.[9]

Other series

A foray into documentary-making has seen Fry fronting the Emmy Award-winning The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive in 2006, and in 2007 a documentary on the subject of HIV and AIDS, HIV and Me. Also in 2006, he appeared in the genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, tracing his family tree to discover his Slovak Jewish ancestry. His six-part travel series Stephen Fry in America began on BBC One on 12 October 2008.[10] A five-part companion series, More Fry in America, has been commissioned for BBC Four; it will feature in-depth essays that Fry could not include in the original programmes because of time constraints.[11]

From 2007 to 2009, Fry appeared in and was executive producer for the legal drama Kingdom, which ran for three series on ITV1.[14] He has also taken up a recurring guest role as psychiatrist Dr. Gordon Wyatt in the popular American drama Bones.

Radio

Fry came to the attention of radio listeners with the 1986 creation of his supposed alter-ego, Donald Trefusis, whose "wireless essays" were broadcast on the BBC Radio 4 programme Loose Ends. In the 1980s he starred as David Lander in four series of the BBC Radio 4 show Delve Special, written by Tony Sarchet, which became a six part Channel 4 series This is David Lander in 1988. In 1988, Fry wrote and presented a six-part comedy series entitled Saturday Night Fry; frequent radio appearances have ensued (notably on panel games Just a Minute and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue). In 2000, he began starring as Charles Prentiss in the Radio 4 comedy Absolute Power, reprising the role for three further series on radio and two on television. In 2002, Fry voiced Winnie-the-Pooh and was one of the narrators in Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, both written by A.A Milne. He presented a weekly, 20 x 120-minute series, "The Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music", a 'witty guide' to the genre over the past 1,000 years, on Classic FM.

In 2007, he hosted Current Puns, an exploration of wordplay, and Radio 4: This Is Your Life, to celebrate the radio station's 40th anniversary. He also interviewed Tony Blair as part of a series of podcasts released by 10 Downing Street.[24]

In February 2008, Fry began presenting podcasts entitled Stephen Fry's Podgrams, in which he recounts his life and recent experiences.[16] In July 2008, Fry appeared as himself in I Love Stephen Fry, an Afternoon Play for Radio 4 written by former Fry and Laurie script editor Jon Canter.[25]

In August 2008 he hosted Fry's English Delight, a three-part series on BBC Radio 4 about metaphor, quotation and cliché.[26] Fry returned with a second series a year later.[27]

In the summer 2009 series of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, Fry was one of a trio of hosts replacing Humphrey Lyttelton (the others being Jack Dee and Rob Brydon).[28]

Theatre

Fry wrote a play entitled Latin! (or Tobacco and Boys) for the 1980 Edinburgh Festival, where it won the "Fringe First" prize.[29] It had a revival in 2009 at London's Cock Tavern Theatre, directed by Adam Spreadbury-Maher.[30]The Cellar Tapes, the Footlights Revue of 1981, won the Perrier Comedy Award. In 1984, Fry adapted the hugely successful 1930s musical, Me and My Girl, for the West End, where it ran for eight years. He also famously starred in Simon Gray's 1995 play, Cell Mates, from which he left three days into the West End run, pleading stage fright. He later recalled the incident as a hypomanic episode in his documentary on bipolar disorder. In 2007, Fry wrote a Christmas pantomime, Cinderella, which ran at London's Old Vic Theatre.[31] Fry is a long-time fan of the 1960s anarchic British musical comedy group, the Bonzo Dog Band and, particularly, of its eccentric front man, the late Vivian Stanshall. Fry helped to fund an ill-fated 1988 London re-staging of the Stanshall's acclaimed Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera, written by Vivian and Ki Longfellow-Stanshall for the Bristol-based Old Profanity Showboat. Fry performed several of Stanshall's numbers as part of the Bonzo's 26 January 2006 reunion concert at the London Astoria. He also appears as a shiny New Millennium Bonzo on their post-reunion album, Pour l'Amour des Chiens, including his reciting of a recipe for "Salmon Proust", playing a butler in "Hawkeye the Gnu", and voicing ads for the fictitious "Fiasco" stores.

When writing a book review for Tatler, Fry wrote under an alias, Williver Hendry, editor of A Most Peculiar Friendship: The Correspondence of Lord Alfred Douglas and Jack Dempsey, a field close to Fry's heart as an Oscar Wilde enthusiast. Once a columnist in The Listener and The Daily Telegraph, he now writes a weekly technology column in the Saturday edition of The Guardian. His blog attracted more than 300,000 visitors in its first two weeks of existence.[10]

On 2 January 2010 it was announced that Fry was "switching off his connections with the outside world" in order to complete a second volume of his autobiography.[35]

Twitter

Fry wields a considerable amount of influence through his use of the social networking site Twitter.[36][37] He is frequently asked to promote various charities and causes, often inadvertently causing the host website to crash due to the sheer volume of traffic generated by his large number of followers, as Fry notes on his website: "Four thousand hits a second all diving down the pipeline at the same time for minutes on end."[38] Fry uses his influence to recommend underexposed musicians and authors (which often see large increases in web hits and sales)[39][40] and to spread contemporary issues in the world of media and politics, notably the dropping of an injunction against The Guardian[41][42] and the lambasting of Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir over her article on deceased Boyzone member Stephen Gately.[43][44]

On 31 October 2009 Stephen Fry sparked debate amongst users again when he announced an intention to leave the social networking site after criticism from another user on Twitter. He retracted the intention the next day.[45]

On 15 November 2009 Stephen's Twitter account reached 1,000,000 followers. He commemorated the million followers milestone with a humorous video blog in which a 'Step Hen Fry' clone speaks from the year 2034 where MySpace, Facebook and Twitter have combined to form 'Twit on MyFace'.[46]

In December 2006 he was ranked sixth for the BBC's Top Living Icon Award,[51] was featured on The Culture Show, and was voted most intelligent man on television by readers of Radio Times. The Independent on Sunday Pink List named Fry the second most influential gay person in Britain in May 2007. He had taken the twenty-third position on the list the previous year.[52] Later the same month he was announced as the 2007 BT Mind Champion of the Year[53] in recognition of the awareness raised about bipolar disorder by his documentary The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive. Fry was also nominated in "Best Entertainment Performance" for QI and "Best Factual Series" for Secret Life of the Manic Depressive at the 2007 British Academy Television Awards.[citation needed] That same year, Broadcast magazine listed Fry at number four in its "Hot 100" list of influential on-screen performers, describing him as a polymath and a "national treasure".[54] He was also granted a lifetime achievement award at the British Comedy Awards on 5 December 2007[55] and the Special Recognition Award at the National Television Awards on 20 January 2010[56].

BBC Four dedicated two nights of programming to Fry on 17 and 18 August 2007, in celebration of his 50th birthday. The first night, comprising programs featuring Fry, began with a sixty-minute documentary entitled Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out. The second night was composed of programs selected by Fry, as well as a 60-minute interview with Mark Lawson and a half-hour special, Stephen Fry: Guilty Pleasures.[citation needed]Stephen Fry Weekend proved such a ratings hit for BBC Four that it was repeated on BBC Two on 16 and 17 of that September. However, there has also been criticism, one journalist describing him as a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person looks like.[57]

Fry has claimed to hold the UK record for saying "fuck" the most times on a live television broadcast.[58]

Personal life

Fry struggled to keep his homosexuality secret during his teenage years at public school, and has claimed not to have engaged in sexual activity for sixteen years from 1979 until 1995.[59][60] When asked when he first acknowledged his sexuality, Fry quipped: "I suppose it all began when I came out of the womb. I looked back up at my mother and thought to myself, 'That's the last time I'm going up one of those.'"[61] Fry currently lives in London with his partner, Daniel Cohen, whom he met in 1995.[62] He drives a black TX4London cab. He also has a second home near King's Lynn, Norfolk.

Fry was an active supporter of the Labour Party for many years, and appeared in a party political broadcast on its behalf with Hugh Laurie and Michelle Collins in November 1993. Despite this, he did not vote in the 2005 General Election because of the stance of both the Labour and Conservative parties with regard to the Iraq War. Despite his praising of the current government for social reform, Fry has been critical of the Labour Party's "Third Way" concept. He is on cordial terms with Prince Charles (despite a mild parody Fry performed in his role of King Charles I in the comedy programme Blackadder: The Cavalier Years), through his work with the Prince's Trust. He attended the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker-Bowles in 2005.

Fry is a friend of British comedian and actor (and Blackadder co-star) Rowan Atkinson and was best man at Atkinson's wedding to Sunetra Sastry at the Russian Tea Room in New York City. He was also a friend of British actor John Mills.[63] He was best man at the wedding of Hugh Laurie (whom he considers to be his best friend[64]) and is godfather to all three of Laurie's children.

Fry has talked on occasion about his passion for whisky. He visited the Woodford Reserve whiskey distillery in Kentucky, US in his BBC series Stephen Fry in America. Stephen cites his favourite whisky as the Master of Malt 19 year old Tomatin.[66]

He has been described as "deeply dippy for all things digital", claims to have owned the second Macintosh computer sold in the UK (the first going to Douglas Adams) and jokes that he has never encountered a smartphone that he has not bought.[67] He counts Wikipedia among his favourite websites "because I like to find out that I died, and that I'm currently in a ballet in China, and all the other very accurate and important things that Wikipedia brings us all."[68]

Fry has a long interest in Internet production, including his own website since 1997. His current site, The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry, has existed since 2002 and has attracted many visitors following his first blog in September 2007, which comprised a 6,500 word "blessay" on smartphones. In February 2008, Fry launched his private podcast series, Stephen Fry's Podgrams, and a forum, including discussions on depression and activities in which Fry is involved. The website content is created by Stephen Fry and produced by Andrew Sampson. Fry is also a supporter[69] of GNU and the Free Software Foundation. For the 25th anniversary of the GNU operating system, Fry appeared in a video explaining some of the philosophy behind GNU by likening it to the sharing found in science.[70] In October 2008, he began posting to his Twitter stream,[71] which he regularly updates.[72] On 16 May 2009, he celebrated the 500,000-follower mark: "Bless my soul 500k followers. And I love you all. Well, all except that silly one. And that's not you."[73]

On 30 April 2008, Fry signed an open letter, published in The Guardian newspaper by some well known Jewish personalities, stating their opposition to celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel.[74] Furthermore, he is a signatory member of the British Jews for Justice for Palestinians organisation, which actively campaigns for Palestinian rights.[75]

A year later, The Guardian published a letter from Fry addressing his younger self, explaining how his future is soon to unfold, reflecting on the positive progression towards gay acceptance and openness around him, and yet not everywhere, while warning on how "the cruel, hypocritical and loveless hand of religion and absolutism has fallen on the world once more".[76]

Fry was among over one hundred signatories to a statement published by Sense About Science on 4 June 2009, condemning British libel laws and their use to "severely curtail the right to free speech on a matter of public interest."[77]

There has been a history, let's face it, in Poland of a right-wing catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history, and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on and know the stories, and know much of the anti-semitic, and homophobic and nationalistic elements in countries like Poland.

The remark prompted a complaint from the Polish Embassy in London, an editorial in The Economist and criticism from British Jewish historian David Cesarani.[80][81][82][83] Fry has since posted a six-page apology on his personal weblog, in which he stated:

I offer no excuse. I seemed to imply that the Polish people had been responsible for the most infamous of all the death factories of the Third Reich. I didn't even really at the time notice the import of what I had said, so gave myself no opportunity instantly to retract the statement. It was a rubbishy, cheap and offensive remark that I have been regretting ever since.[84]

I take this opportunity to apologise now. I said a stupid, thoughtless and fatuous thing. It detracted from and devalued my argument, such as it was, and it outraged and offended a large group of people for no very good reason. I am sorry in all directions, and all the more sorry because it is no one's fault but my own, which always makes it so much worse.[84]

Health

Fry has been diagnosed with cyclothymia, a mild form of bipolar disorder.[85] He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1995 while appearing in a West End play called Cell Mates and subsequently walked out of the production, prompting its early closure and incurring the displeasure of co-star Rik Mayall and playwright Simon Gray. Mayall's comedy partner, Adrian Edmondson, made light of the subject in his and Mayall's second Bottom live show. After walking out of the production, Fry went missing for several days while contemplating suicide. He abandoned the idea and left the United Kingdom by ferry, eventually resurfacing in Belgium.[86] Fry has spoken publicly about his experience with bipolar disorder, which was also depicted in the documentary Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic-Depressive.[87][88] In the programme, he interviewed other sufferers of the illness including celebrities Carrie Fisher, Richard Dreyfuss and Tony Slattery. Also featured were chef Rick Stein, whose father committed suicide, Robbie Williams, who talks of his experience with major depression, and comedienne/former mental health nurse Jo Brand.

In 2009, Fry lent his support to a campaign led by the human rights organisation Reprieve to prevent the execution of Akmal Shaikh, a British national who suffered from bipolar disorder, yet, despite calls for clemency, was executed in the People's Republic of China.[89]

Fry has a deviated nasal septum because he fell and broke his nose when he was six. He is six feet five inches tall. (QI Season 4 ep. 11 of 13).

In January 2008, he broke his arm while filming Last Chance to See in Brazil.[90] He later explained in a podcast how the accident happened: while climbing aboard a boat, he slipped between it and the dock, and, while stopping himself from falling into the water, his body weight caused his right humerus to snap. The damage was more severe than first thought: the resulting vulnerability to his radial nerve — he was at risk of losing the use of his arm — was not diagnosed until he saw a consultant in the UK.[91]

As the host of QI, Fry has revealed that he is allergic to both champagne[92] and bumble bee stings.[93]

Appearing on Top Gear in 2009, Fry had lost a significant amount of weight, prompting host Jeremy Clarkson to ask jokingly, "Where's the rest of you?" Fry explained that he had shed a total of 6 stone (84 lb; 38 kg).[94]

Business

In 2008, Fry formed SamFry Ltd, with long-term collaborator Andrew Sampson, to produce and fund new content, as well as manage his official website.[95]

Contents

Sourced

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be
full of them.

The Liar (1991)

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at
the altar of language and purity and tolerance. That is my
religion, and every day I am sorely, grossly, heinously and deeply
offended, wounded, mortified and injured by a thousand different
blasphemies against it. When the fundamental canons of truth,
honesty, compassion and decency are hourly assaulted by fatuous
bishops, pompous, illiberal and ignorant priests, politicians and
prelates, sanctimonious censors, self-appointed moralists and
busy-bodies, what recourse of ancient laws have I? None whatever.
Nor would I ask for any. For unlike these blistering imbeciles my
belief in my religion is strong and I know that lies will always
fail and indecency and intolerance will always perish.

"Trefusis Blasphemes" radio broadcast

If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a
hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that
they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain
all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls
daily about our ears.

(On libraries) What's great about them is that anybody can go
into them and find a book and borrow it free of charge and read it.
They don't have to steal it from a bookshop... You know when you're
young, you're growing up, they're almost sexually exciting places
because books are powerhouses of knowledge, and therefore they're
kind of slightly dark and dangerous. You see books that kind of
make you go 'Oh!'

The key word for me (my spleen isn't really big enough to
explode with all the splenetic juices of fury that drive me when I
consider this), but the real key word that triggers my rage is the
word 'energy', when people start talking about it in terms of
negative or positive types. For instance, "there's very negative
energy in here." What are you talking about? What do you mean? I
mean, let's think about it. What does energy mean? Well, we know
what it means: energy from petrol when it's burned, it moves the
car. "This room has positive energy" — well, where the f**k's it
going then? It's not moving. It's covering up such woolly thinking,
such pathetic nonsense. And astrology: most people will say of
astrology, "Well, it's harmless fun." And I should say that for 80%
of the cases it probably is harmless fun, but there's a strong way
in which it isn't harmless. One, because it is so anti-science. You
will hear things like, "Science doesn't know everything." Well, of
course science doesn"t know everything. But, because
science doesn't know everything, it doesn't mean that science knows
nothing. Science knows enough for us to be watched by a
few million people now on television, for these lights to be
working, for quite extraordinary miracles to have taken place in
terms of the harnessing of the physical world and our dim
approaches towards understanding it. And as Wittgenstein quite rightly said, "When
we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still
be left the eternal mystery of the human heart."

Room 101 (2001)

On the subject of biblical texts and examples to why you can't
do certain things with your body that you wish to, I find that
absolutely absurd. I've always been extremely uncomfortable with
the idea in any society that the belief is based on revealed truth,
that's to say on a text like a Bible or a Qur'an, or whatever it
is. It seems to me that the greatness of our culture, for all its
incredible faults, is that we have grown up on the Greek ideal of
discovering the truth, discovering by looking around us, by
empirical experiment, by the combination of the experience of
generations of ancestors who have contributed to our sum knowledge
of the way the world works, and so on. And to have that snatched
away and to be told what to think by a book, however great it may
be in places, this is a book that says you can sell your daughter
into slavery, it's a book that bans menstruating women from within
miles of temples. The fact that it also says that for one man to
lie with another man is an abomination, is no more made relevant or
important than the fact that you can't eat shellfish.

I don't think we should ever allow religion the trick of
maintaining that the spiritual and the beautiful and the noble and
the altruistic and the morally strong and the virtuous are in any
way inventions of religion or particular or peculiar to religion.
It's certainly true that you could say the Christ who said "Let him
who is without sin cast the first stone" - that's a wonderful to
have said. Anyone who said that would earn a great deal of respect
and interest, you'd say that's one of most beautiful phrases ever,
ever uttered. But there is no, absolutely no monopoly on beauty and
truth in religion, and I suppose one of the reasons that I'm so
fond of the Greeks, and one of the reasons that the great radical
and poet Shelley wrote his Prometheus
Unbound was that he understood that if you were to compare the
Genesis myth, which has, which had bedeviled our culture, the
Western European culture for a very long time indeed, for two
thousand years, it was essentially a myth in which we should be
ashamed of ourselves. God says: who told you you were naked? What
possible reason have we to believe that we are naked or that if we
are naked there is something to be ashamed of, that what we are and
what we do is something for which we should ever apologise, we
should apologise for our dreams, our impulses, our appetites, our
drives, our desires, are not things to apologise for. Our actions
sometimes we do apologise for and we excoriate ourselves for and
rightly, but that's the Genesis myth. The Greek myth of Prometheus,
who stole fire from heaven and who gave to his favourite - his
favourite mortal: man. In other words what the Greeks were saying
is that we have divine fire, whatever is divine is in us, as
humans. We are as good as the gods. The gods are capricious and
mean and foolish and stupid and jealous and rapine and all the
things that Greek mythology show us that they are, and that's a
much better it seems to me - and for that the gods punished
Prometheus and chained him to the Caucasus and vultures chewed away
at his liver everyday as it regrew because he was immortal of
course, and Shelley quite rightly understood - and interestingly
his wife of course wrote Frankenstein as the modern
Prometheus - understood that that mythological idea, that champion
of a real humanity and a real humanism, as we've come to call it,
is we are captains of our soul and masters of our destiny, and that
we contain any divine fire that there is, divine fire that is fine
and great. I mean it's perfectly obvious that if there were ever a
God he has lost all possible taste. You've only got to look -
forget the aggression and unpleasantness of the radical right or
the Islamic hordes to the East - the sheer lack of intelligence and
insight and ability to express themselves and to enthuse others of
the priesthood and the clerisy here, in this country, and indeed in
Europe, you know God once had Bach and Michelangelo on his
side, he had Mozart, and now who does he have? People with ginger
whiskers and tinted spectacles who reduce the glories of theology
to a kind of sharing, you know? That's what religion has
become, a feeble and anaemic nonsense, because we understood that
the fire was within us, it was not in some idol on an altar,
whether it was a gold cross or whether it was a Buddha or anything
else, that we have it. The fault is in our stars, but also the
glory is (correcting himself) in us not in our stars. The
glory - anything - we take credit for what is great about man and
we take blame for what is dreadful about man, we neither grovel or
apologise at the feet of a god, or are so infantile as to project
the idea that we once had a father as human beings and we therefore
should have a divine one too. We have to grow up, which is partly
what Christopher was saying.

Almost the whole of my text at the moment, in my head as I fall
asleep, is summed up by the word "contempt". Contempt, in politics,
for the hypocrisy, the double standards, the double dealing, the
corruption and the moral suasion. It's almost impossible for me to
explain just how deeply I feel contempt. I want to go into detail -
and I think you'll be rather shocked, and I hope rather edified, by
what I have to say. So who are these terrible hypocrites? Who are
these double dealers? Who are these liars and fraudulent corrupt
people? Well, you're listening to one of them: that's me. And I'm
talking to millions of them: that's you. It's not the politicians,
God bless them. Sexless, uninteresting, graceless and very often
styleless people as they may be, it is we who are the problem in
politics. We expect a very high standard of living. We expect food
to be cheap and available. We expect energy to be cheap and
available. we also expect to be able to mouth off at parties about
how terrible it is that the ozone layer is being eaten away and the
glaciers are melting and how awful it is that people are starving
in other countries. And we pay this group of styleless sexless
people whom we call politicians a small amount of money in order to
lay off our own guilt. Our own cant and hypocrisy is laid at their
door. And apparently, it's they who are the hypocrites. It is they
who are corrupt. it is they who refuse to solve the problems of the
world. Well, it isn't. It's us. It's me, and it's you. Take this
week, for example. Suppose you're prime minister, you've got all
these illegal immigrants. What are you supposed to do? Are you
supposed to hide the true facts? That's hardly something the public
would accept, so you campaign and you say "we don't know how many
there are - let's do something about it", and then you're accused
of incompetence. Well, of course you don't know how many there are:
they're illegal immigrants. Do we expect magic from our
politicians? We're not going to get it. They're just human beings
like you and me. And what about this "Let's Talk" business? Yes, it
sounds like a very bad BT advert. On the other hand, what would we
say if they didn't say that? We'd say that they're arrogant, and
that they never listen. They can't win because they've got us to
serve, and we are filth. The wheels have come off the New Labour
project, everyone agrees, and so therefore it will come to pass.
All aeroplanes have a certain amount of life in the sky, and then
metal fatigue hits and they fall out of it. As someone who worked
hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really.
It was bound to happen. And it'll happen with the next government,
and the one after it. Because all governments serve us.
They serve the filth.

I should say today that it's tragic that people lose faith in
what was once an honourable profession but people will lose faith
in journalists. There's nothing one can do about it. People no
longer trust journalists - we'll have to turn to politics instead
for our belief in people. I almost mean that. Although, of course,
anybody can talk about snouts in troughs and go on about it, for
journalists to do so is almost beyond belief. Beyond belief. I know
lots of journalists - I know more journalists than I know
politicians - and I've never met a more venal and disgusting crowd
of people when it comes to expenses and allowances...Not all [of
them] but then not all human beings are either. I've cheated
expenses. I've fiddled things. You have, of course you have. Let's
not confuse what politicians get really wrong - things like wars,
things where people die - with the rather tedious bourgeois
obsession with whether or not they've charged for their wisteria.
It's not that important, it really isn't. It isn't what we're
fighting for. It isn't what voting is for and the idea that 'Oh,
we've all lost faith in politics' [is] nonsense. It's a
journalistic made-up frenzy. I know you don't want me to say that.
You want me to say "No, it matters, it's important." It isn't it.
Believe me, it isn't. It's not the big deal; it's not what we
should be worrying about. I know no one's going to pay any
attention and newspapers will great joy over filling yards and
yards of newsprint with tiny, pointless details of this
politician's or that politician's squalid and sad little life as
they see it. It's not the big picture, it really isn't. You know,
we get the politicians we deserve, it's our fault as much as
anybody else's. This has been going on for years and suddenly
because a journalist discovers it it's the biggest story ever! It's
absolute nonsense, it really is.

I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God or
faith in crystals. I very rarely have faith in God; I occasionally
have little spasms of it, but they go away, if I think hard enough
about it. I am incandescent with rage at the idea of horoscopes and
of crystals and of the nonsense of 'New Age', or indeed even more
pseudo-scientific things: self-help, and the whole culture of
'searching for answers', when for me, as someone brought up in the
unashamed Western tradition of music and poetry and philosophy, all
the answers are there in the work that has been done by humanity
before us, in literature, in art, in science, in all the marvels
that have created this moment now, instead of people looking away.
The image to me . . . is gold does exist, and for 'gold'
say 'truth', say 'the answer', say 'love', say 'justice', say
anything: it does exist. But the only way in this world you can
achieve gold is to be incredibly intelligent about geology, to
learn what mankind has learnt, to learn where it might lie, and
then break your fingers and blister your skin in digging for it,
and then sweat and sweat in a forge, and smelt it. And you will
have gold, but you will never have it by closing your eyes and
wishing for it. No angel will lean out of the bar of heaven and
drop down sheets of gold for you. And we live in a society in which
people believe they will. But the real answer, that there
is gold, and that all you have to do is try and understand
the world enough to get down into the muck of it, and you will have
it, you will have truth, you will have justice, you will have
understanding, but not by wishing for it.

You cannot work too hard at poetry. People are bad at it not
because they have tin ears, but because they simply don't have the
faintest idea how much work goes into it. It's not as if you're
ordering a pizza or doing something that requires direct
communication in a very banal way. But it seems these days the only
people who spend time over things are retired people and prisoners.
We bolt things, untasted. It's so easy to say, 'That'll do.'
Everyone's in a hurry. People are intellectually lazy, morally
lazy, ethically lazy...All the time. When people get angry with a
traffic warden they don't stop and think what it would be like to
be a traffic warden or how annoying it would be if people could
park wherever they liked. People talk lazily about how hypocritical
politicians are. But everyone is. On the one hand we hate that
petrol is expensive and on the other we go on about global warming.
We abrogate the responsibility for thought and moral decisions onto
others and then have the luxury of saying it's not good enough.

I genuinely believe that the Catholic church is not, to
put it at its mildest, a force for good in the world. And
therefore it is important for me to try and martial my facts as
well I can to explain why I think that. But I want first of all to
say that I have no quarrel, no argument and I wish to express no
contempt for individual devout and pious members of that church. It
would be impertinent and wrong of me to express any antagonism
towards any individual who wishes to find salvation in whatever
form they wish to express it. That to me is sacrosanct as much as
any article of faith is sacrosanct to anyone of any church or any
faith in the world. It’s very important. It’s also very important
to me as it happens that I have my own believes. They are a belief
in the Enlightenment, they’re a belief in the eternal adventure of
trying to discover moral truth in the world. And there is nothing,
sadly, that the Catholic church and its hierarchs likes to do more
than to attack the Enlightenment. It did so at the time – reference
was made to Galileo and the fact that he was tortured for trying to
explain the Copernican theory of the universe. Just imagine in this
square mile how many people were burned for reading the Bible in
English. And one of the principle burners and tortures of those who
tried to read the Bible in English here in London was Thomas More.
Now, that’s a long time ago, it’s not relevant. Except, that it was
only last century that Thomas More was made a saint and it was only
in the year 2000 that the last pope, the Pole, he made Thomas More
the Patron Saint of Politicians. This is a man who put people on
the rack for daring to own a Bible in English. He tortured them for
owning a Bible in their own language. The idea that the Catholic
church exists to disseminate the word of the Lord is nonsense. It
is the only owner of the truth for the billions that it likes to
boast about. Because those billions are uneducated and poor, as
again it likes to boast about. It’s perhaps unfair of me as a gay
man to moan this enormous institution, which is the largest and
most powerful church on earth. It has over a billion, as they like
to tell us, members, each one of whom is under strict instructions
to believe the dogmas of the church, but may wrestle personally
with them of course. It’s hard for me to be told that I am evil,
because I think of myself as someone who is filled with love. Whose
only purpose in life is to achieve love and who feels love for so
much of nature and the world and for everything else. We
certainly don’t need the stigmatisation, the victimisation that
leads to the playground bullying when people say: “You’re a
disordered, morally evil individual.” That’s not nice, it isn’t
nice. The kind of cruelty in Catholic education and the
kind of child abuse – let’s not call it child abuse, it was child
rape – the kind of child rape that went on systematically for so
long... Let’s imagine that we can overlook this and say it has
nothing whatever to do with the structure and nature of the
Catholic church and the twisted and neurotic and hysterical way
that its leaders are chosen, the celibacy, the nuns, the monks, the
priesthood: this is not natural and normal, ladies and gentlemen,
in 2009. It really isn’t. I have yet to approach one of the subject
dearest to my heart. I’ve made three documentary films on subject
of AIDS in Africa. My particular love is the country of Uganda,
it’s one of the countries that I love most in the world. There was
a period when Uganda had the worst incidence of HIV/AIDS in the
world. But through an amazing initiative called ABC: Abstinence, Be
faithful, Correct use of condoms... Those three – I am not denying
that abstinence is a very good way of not getting AIDS, it really
is, it works. So does being faithful, but so do condoms!
And do not deny it! And this Pope not satisfied with saying:
“Condoms are against our religion. Please consider first
abstinence, second being faithful to your partner,” he spreads that
lie that condoms actually increase the incidence of AIDS. He
actually makes sure that AIDS is conditional on saying “no” to
condoms. I have been to – there is a hospital in Bwindi in the west
of Uganda where I do quite a lot of work – it is unbelievable, the
pain and suffering you see. Now yes, yes it is true, abstinence
will stop it. It’s the strangest thing about this church, it is
obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now they will say we “with
our permissive society and rude jokes are obsessed.” No, we have a
healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly, because it’s a
primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a
bit like food in that respect only even more exciting. The only
people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly
obese and that in erotic terms is the Catholic church in a
nutshell. Do you know who would be the last person ever to be
accepted as a prince of the church? The Galilean carpenter, that
Jew. They would kick him out before he tried to cross the
threshold. He would be so ill at ease in the church. What would he
think – what would he think of St. Peter’s? What would he
think of the wealth and the power and the self-justification and
the wheedling apologies? The Pope could decide that all this power,
all this wealth, this hierarchy of princes and bishops and
archbishops and priests and monks and nuns could be sent out in the
world with money and art treasures to put the back in the countries
that they once raped and violated. They could give that money away
and they could concentrate on the apparent essence of their belief.
And then I would stand here and say that Catholic church may well
be a force for good in the world, but until that day, it is not.
Thank you.

Abridged Intelligence² debate speech: "The Catholic church is a
force for good in the world", November 7th 2009

Moab is My
Washpot (autobiography, 1997)

I have always disbelieved that Sicilian saying about revenge
being a dish best served cold. I feel that--don't you?--when I see
blinking, quivering octogenarian Nazi war criminals being led away
in chains. Why not then? It's too late now. I
want to see them taken back in time and punished
then...Blame, certainly, is a dish only edible when served
fresh and warm. Old blames, grudges and scores congeal and curdle
and cause the most terrible indigestion.

I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday .
. . mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only
moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.

on his frustrating inability to sing

I know that my early life was at one and the same time so
common as to be unremarkable, and so strange as to be the stuff of
fiction. I know of course that this is how all human lives
are, but that it is only given to a few of us to luxuriate in the
bath of self-revelation, self-curiosity, apology, revenge,
bafflement, vanity and egoism that goes under the name
Autobiography. You have seen me at my washpot scrubbing at the
grime of years: to wallow in a washpot may not be the same thing as
to be purified and cleansed, but I have come away from this very
draining, highly bewildering and passionately intense few months
feeling slightly less dirty. Less dirty about the first twenty
years of my life, at least. The second twenty, now that is
another story.

It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most
clichés, that cliché is untrue.

It is, I know, for I have experienced it perhaps twice in my
life, an awful privilege to be too much loved and perhaps the
kindest thing I ever did in my life was never to let Matthew know
to what degree he had destroyed my peace and my happiness.

I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing.
Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden
indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the
speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing
life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.

On his suicide attempt at age 17

LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity,
their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you,
the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of
yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the
nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives
access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a
fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the
need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is one of LSD's most
distressing and least endearing side-effects.

When I had first caught sight of Matthew I saw the beauty in
everything. Now I saw only ugliness and decay. All beauty was in
the past. Again and again I wrote in poems, in notes, on scraps of
paper. My whole life stretched out gloriously behind
me. If I wrote that sick phrase once, I wrote it fifty
times. And I believed it, too.

Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is
unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

My vocal cords are made of tweed. I give off an air of Oxford
donnishness and old BBC wirelesses.

My first words, as I was being born... I looked up at my mother
and said, "that's the last time I'm coming out one of those."

On being gay

Stephen Fry actually admitted this was a quote from a friend,
not himself. (Moab Is My Washpot)

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its
asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and
feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I
possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to
go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had
also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to
transform.

Didn't Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to
Faust? Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and
Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves
that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of
attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of
integration and acceptance; but we also in our great creating
imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and
terror we will take from others' shoulders; our penetration into
the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission to willingness
to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in
the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and
compromise of a world which we see to be so false. There is
nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent
imagination.

On adolescence

Quotes from
Twitter

Weak watery sun, but sun nonetheless. Why does it take me
nearly 2 hours just to get through the morning emails? Pah, poo and
pants. Twitter (April 18,
2009).

I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any
decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome
and inhumane.

External
links

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